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Black women have been fetishized for their features for years. We’ve seen the Jezebel stereotype thrive even during this time; from personal experience I’ve seen black women painted as lascivious man-stealers whose beauty is enough to evoke so much envy that it warrants hate, even within our own community.

It’s confusing how black women are made fun of for having certain features but non-black celebrities who get surgery to copy these features are praised. This isn’t something new. Black culture has been appropriated and made fun of for years and shows no chance of stopping, especially with this new trend: blackfishing.

First off, what is blackfishing? You know how catfishing is when a person pretends to be someone else? It’s like that, except it’s white women pretending to be black women. All of these blackfishers claim it wasn’t their intention, yet still refuse to see why it’s wrong.

One accused blackfishers said that she simply just did enough tanning to make her skin many shades darker than their original pale skin tone. Said blackfisher even said that she wasn’t really white, but Polish, which means she’s not white white (she is) and that she is olive-skinned (that implies she wasn’t pale to begin with, but previous pictures show otherwise–so yeah, she’s still white and pale). She even got box braids, yet still claims that she wasn’t trying to look black.

Another blackfisher says that her newfound dark skin is a natural tan, even though, just like the previously mentioned blackfisher, she’s naturally incredibly pale, and there’s no way a tan would look like that unless she purposefully put on enough makeup and used other methods to look similar to a black woman. She also seems to have enlarged her lips, and even admitted that she uses darker foundation so it looks more natural.

Blackfishing shouldn’t be a thing to exist. It’s literally just blackface under the guise of being a pretty Instagram model or something. You don’t need to do blackface to be pretty. Black girls have been teased for having darker skin or having a different hair type than white girls. We continually get made fun of, stereotyped, and fetishized for merely existing, but then we turn into a trend when someone else attempts to mimic us in the name of fashion. Blackfishing as well as excusing it is unfair to black women, ugly, and it needs to die out–fast.

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